Lions NFC Playoff Picture: Bears & Packers lose, no Wild Card help

Lions NFC Playoff Picture: Bears & Packers lose, no Wild Card help

The Detroit Lions didn’t help themselves on Thanksgiving, when they couldn’t find a way to win a winnable must-win game. But they got a little help from their NFC North rivals.

The Chicago Bears, already all but eliminated from playoff contention, were emphatically turned into non-factors by the Philadelphia Eagles. After getting housed 31-3, the Bears are 3-8 and will be sleepwalking through the rest of the season.

With luck, they’ll be extra sleepy on December 16, when they come to Ford Field for a game the Lions absolutely cannot drop.

The Green Bay Packers also continued their slide towards irrelevance in Week 12, but not for lack of trying. Backup quarterback Brett Hundley and company put up an excellent performance in Heinz Field, scaring the daylights out of the Pittsburgh Steelers on “Sunday Night Football.”

But a last-second field goal made the final score 31-28 in Pittsburgh’s favor, and Green Bay is now 5-6 with five games left to play. They’ll have to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Cleveland Browns, Carolina Panthers and the division-leading Vikings to have any kind of postseason chance doing into the Ford Field season finale.

It’s a little too early to call the Packers done—many did that in 2016, before they ran the table and made the playoffs—but it’s very hard to see them getting through that five-game stretch without picking up at least two losses.

That means they’ll all but certainly be out of the playoff picture when they come to Detroit.

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Per the NFL.com Playoff Picture tool, Detroit is currently the second team past the cut, with Carolina and Atlanta taking the two Wild Card spots and the Seattle Seahawks one win ahead of the Lions, at 7-4.

But don’t get caught up in the trap of looking at these teams with seven and eight wins with five to play and thinking they’re all going to end up with 11 or 12 wins. For starters, they nearly all still play each other.

It’s true that if the Lions don’t win every single one of their remaining slate of games, having lost head-to-head against the top three NFC South teams means getting in at 10-6 will be very hard.

But only once since the 2002 realignment has an 11-5 team missed the playoffs, so those thinking this week’s results eliminate Detroit are thinking way too pessimistically.